Richard Colman Interview

by Maxwell Williams

Richard Colman is a California artist whose stone-faced clandestine people (and bears) populate paintings and murals of elaborately surreal scenes of geometrically patterned madness. There’s enough of death, sex and creepy activity to incite a nightmare, but Colman himself turns out to be a pleasant, if not shy, conversationalist. Colman has a beautiful new book out with Ginkgo Press titled I Was Just Leaving. MakingRoom took a moment to speak to him about his rainbow vomiting and meditative paper tearing mural techniques.

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MakingRoom: Thank god it’s Friday, huh?

Richard Colman: I don’t have Fridays.

MR: You pretty much work every day?

RC: Seven days a week, twelve hours a day.

MR: Oh, man. That’s intense.

RC: I deal with deadlines, so I pretty much just have to go until it’s done.

Exactly. So, you grew up in DC…

RC: Well, in Maryland. Basically right there.

MR: I’m interested to know what you were like as a kid.

RC: I think I was a pretty introverted kid, with a not very good attention span.

MR: And you wrote graffiti when you were a kid? Starting when?

RC: Early 90s.

MR: You were in school at the time?

RC: In high school, yeah.

MR: How did you get interested in graffiti? Was there a friend that got you into it?

RC: You just see it. I think you end up meeting people as you go, but that was probably the least appealing part of it to me: the social aspect. I had kind of a tough time with that. So I just liked going out and doing my own thing.

MR: Did you fly solo most of the time?

RC: Most of the time. I was with my brother a lot. There were a handful of people that I would do the graffiti with, occasionally.

MR: Do you feel like that’s where you honed your artistic skills?

RC: It’s hard to say. I don’t think it honed it, but it was something that probably kept my interest in drawing, and kept all that going.

MR: You had been doodling before?

RC: Yeah of course—watching TV, drawing on the floor. I think for someone like that graffiti is very appealing.

MR: You said that you were pretty introverted. Is art a way of being able to express yourself?

RC: Yeah, I think so. I depend very heavily on the public arena of doing art shows as a form of communication. Because on my own, I don’t talk to people that much. It’s a good icebreaker.

MR: I want you to take me through the process of getting started on a painting. Say you’ve just finished a painting and you want to start another one. What do you do? Do you go out and buy supplies? Do you gather everything together?

RC: Honestly, the process is changing just because of the deadline factor. If I’m sitting down to draw something, I’m starting something that’s going to be a finished piece. I usually don’t have to go out and get too many supplies, just because the supplies I use, I keep myself pretty limited. I’ve got it pretty scaled down to what I need. So, unless I need to replace a brush or ink, I’m ready to go.

MR: You’ve streamlined your materials?

RC: Again, that’s just from my attention going all over the place. When I was younger, of course, I played around with a lot of stuff. The more shit that was around, the more confused I would get, and I couldn’t really figure out a way to put all of it together.

MR: Now you have one thing and you go through with it?

RC: I’m not saying that I’ve figured out what I do, and that it’s just sort of a system. It’s not that at all. Because with each thing that I do, I try to push it a little further, experiment a little more.

MR: But did it come from failing with other materials?

RC: Yeah, materials and visual language. I do work very hard to push things further and to make them progress. I don’t know if you got the copy of the book, but everything in the book is within a five-year period. I feel like I do experiment quite a bit, but as far as materials go, I can’t just sit there and start laying on paint and seeing where it goes because it won’t go anywhere. I’ll just keep doing that, and it’s fun, but...

MR: If you have time in between projects, do you experiment more?

RC: If there is time, I’ll definitely do that. I’ll sit there and work on tons of crap. Unusable garbage. But I think everything adds to what I’m doing.

MR: You learn things from these paintings?

RC: Right, exactly. It’s not like I change completely what I do with each one. It’s more that by doing something totally different for a little bit, when I go back to the way that I’m comfortable working, it’ll add another element to it.

MR: When was the first time that you started to use the bears and the hooded figures within your work?

RC: They’ve kind of been around forever. They’ve changed over time into what they are now. And I’m sure they’ll turn into other things. Those are elements that have pretty much been in there since day one.

MR: If you were to look back at drawings that you made when you were a kid, they will pop up in some form or another?

RC: Yeah. Aside from the actual figure themselves, I work very heavily with visual symbolism. The symbols for what they are have definitely been there for a long time.

MR: What are you trying to express with the symbols? Is it any message in particular?

RC: It’s funny, because what may mean one thing in one painting may mean something else in another. They take on their own life with each painting. But the bears for instance tend to represent an instinctual or natural side of who I am. And the hooded figures tend to be a negative symbol: death and all that nonsense.

MR: But it seems like in some of the paintings that these hooded figures that are—I don’t want to say “vomiting rainbows”—but it seems…

RC: No, they are. They’re vomiting rainbows. They’re literally vomiting rainbows. (Laughs.)

MR: To me that seems like there’s some sort of good in them.

RC: Exactly. I think that’s the sort of thing that makes working like this interesting to me, the way not everything is black or what. Any sort of juxtaposition like that is fun. People in general tend to contradict themselves with what they’re perceived as and what they are.

MR: You have these recurring characters. Do you know what situation they’re going to be in before you start painting or are you doing things more intuitively?

RC: Generally with smaller paintings, I’ll know ahead of time. I’ll know what I’m going to do before I do it. With larger paintings, which I’m getting more into now—they’re getting bigger and more involved—it’s more about developing their life within the painting itself, and having them take on their own personality. It takes the fun out of it to be like, “I’m going to do a big painting of this.”

MR: You use a lot of geometry…

RC: The layout of the painting tends to be very mapped out. Again, just being sort of scatterbrained, I have to lay things in very solidly. And then I can figure out, “Okay, this guy lives over here. Well if he’s over here, why is that going on over here?” It’s just this combination of figuring out from the base of the structure or the general layout and just figuring out the life of the painting off of it. It’s just laying down a foundation.

MR: I’m also wondering about the symmetry.

RC: It could be a Libra thing. I don’t know why I do that. Actually with the newer ones, I’ve been working real hard—they still start out really balanced—but I’m going into them and trying to unbalance them.

MR: So you’re breaking away from the symmetry?

RC: Definitely. But, it’s hard because, though I’m in awe of people who are, I’m not a very organic painter. I have to draw everything out before I start painting. I can’t paint something and then add something and take something away. It doesn’t really work for me that well. I’ve worked it out with the drawing. I draw. That’s mostly what I do. So, by the time I start painting, it’s just a matter of figuring out colors.

MR: Where do the drawings start? Are you sketching on a bus or something?

RC: I used to. I used to just sit around and draw and do all that. Now, fortunately financially, I pretty much have to start drawing to do a finished painting. My day is: I wake up probably around eight, get to the studio by nine and go home probably around one or two o’clock and go to sleep. And then come back. (Laughs.)

MR: When you’re in this process, do you have certain times for things?

RC: No. Pretty much, I’ll start working on a couple paintings and whichever one grabs me and says, “I need working on today.” I’ll work on whichever one I’m feeling needs it.

MR: The big paintings you do are basically murals. I wanted to know about your connection to the muralists (José) Orozco and (Diego) Rivera. Do you feel a strong connection to them? Do you look to them for inspiration at all?

RC: Art like that definitely set a tone. It always appealed to me how meaningful what they did was, but also just how accessible it was to people in general. You didn’t have to have some sort of fucking degree to know what was going on or to figure it out. It was for everybody and I like that about that. I think that’s stuck with me over the years.

MR: Is that something you’re conscious of when you paint?

RC: Oh definitely. I try to make my paintings as meaningful and interesting as possible, but at the same time, I don’t want to feel like I’m excluding anyone or feel like I have to make up some line of bullshit for why I think it’s a good painting and why you should. The way I see it, as I get further along, I’m abstracting things more. One day, it might be totally out there, but I feel like it’s not going to be baseless. It’ll already be based in artwork that’s solid. It’s not just, “I’m some dude who felt like making blobs, so I’ll make them blobs.” So, if I make blobs, I want there to be a definite concrete reason for making the blobs.

MR: What are your obsessions as related to your paintings?

RC: Well, I’m obsessed with the act of painting itself. You get these things in your head and they have to be done. There’s no way around it, it just has to be done, so you do it. So, I’m obsessed that way. I’m obsessed with paper. I’m obsessed with patterning. I go crazy with the patterning. That’s probably why they’re taking me so long. That and ink. (Laughs.)

MR: Do you go into the paper store and spend hours looking for paper?

RC: No. I can’t stray from the one paper that I use. That’s the thing. I’m obsessive that way. If I use something, it’s like I’ve got to use that. Something else is going to ruin my day.

MR: I notice with your murals, you do them in small blocks. Are you using the same paper?

RC: Actually, they’re laid out already like that before I start. It’s paper all tiled together. I find it relaxing to tear up paper, so sit there and it helps me organize my thoughts by tearing up these hundreds and hundreds of sheets of little paper. (Laughs.) And then putting them on—they’re all different tones, so it’s like the patterning thing. “This tone is over here. Oh! What should put over here?”

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Richard Colman is based in Los Angeles. For more information, check richardcolmanart.com/. Images courtesy of Gingko Press.